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Restoring a Meadow to Grandeur

The East Meadow is the last of the seven major lawns in Central Park to be restored.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

At six acres, the East Meadow is neither the largest nor the most heavily used of Central Park’s seven major lawns. But its reopening on Tuesday morning represents an important milestone for the park. It is the final meadow to be restored, in the culmination of a three-decade experiment in which an outside group, the Central Park Conservancy, was created to raise private funds, map out an ambitious restoration plan and then execute it.

Pastoral landscapes were among three key components of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s vision for Central Park, along with woodlands and formal areas. East Meadow, which runs from 97th to 100th Street near Fifth Avenue, is, according to some park aficionados, perhaps the finest example of such a landscape.

“You get a sense of what Olmsted and Vaux were trying to create,” said Douglas Blonsky, the park administrator and the president of the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages the park for New York City. “This lawn is much more of a rolling meadow than the others, and it gives the impression that it keeps on going.”

Until last summer, the meadow was a forbidding dust bowl. Now, after a $3 million renovation, it has new drainage and irrigation systems; its undulating emerald expanse is newly sodded with Kentucky bluegrass. A few new trees were planted around the periphery, including silver maples and a disease-resistant variety of American elm.

When the conservancy was formed, in 1980, the park was at perhaps its lowest point. Landmark buildings like Belvedere Castle and the Dairy were marred by graffiti and closed to the public. Once-lush meadows were nothing more than fields of packed dirt. And crime and drug violence scared visitors away.

Spending $550 million over 31 years, with $430 million of that raised privately, the conservancy has meticulously restored every building in the park, as well as nearly all bridges, arches and monuments. Its staff of 200, aided by thousands of volunteers, has renovated landscapes, created education programs and built new structures, like the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center on the Harlem Meer. During its tenure, the conservancy says, park visitation has tripled, to 38 million a year. Of the conservancy’s annual operating budget of $41.5 million, 85 percent comes from private sources.

Photo

Before work began, the six-acre expanse was a dust bowl.Credit
Central Park Conservancy

The conservancy model has since been copied in New York and around the country. The Prospect Park Alliance in Brooklyn and Friends of the High Line in Manhattan also do extensive fund-raising.

Some say that private philanthropy leads governments to scale back their own budgets, but New Yorkers for Parks, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, said it had seen no evidence of that. “The more difficult question,” said Alyson Beha, the group’s director of research, planning and policy, “is what about all these other parks that don’t have the private money and are not located in wealthy neighborhoods?”

Park historians say the resplendent state of Central Park speaks to the conservancy’s success, as well as to the extraordinary wealth surrounding the park.

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“They have done a remarkable job,” said Alexander D. Garvin, professor of urban planning and management at Yale University and author of “Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities.”

“I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker, and I grew up playing in Central Park,” Mr. Garvin, 70, said. “This park has never been in better shape. Never.”

The conservancy also benefited from the simple fact of a world-class park plan. “It is, in my judgment, the greatest park in the world,” Mr. Garvin said. “The people who live around the park, and the corporations, have such a great deal of wealth that they are able to contribute money in amounts that cannot be raised elsewhere.”

Mr. Blonsky said that the conservancy had tackled about 80 percent of its agenda but that its work was not over. What has been restored requires constant, costly maintenance. As for new projects, attention will soon turn to improvements to drainage and to trails in the North Woods and the Ramble. But conservancy officials paused to savor the latest hurdle on Monday. “This has been a long time coming,” Neil Calvanese, the conservancy’s vice president for operations, said. “We’re very happy to see it the way it should be, with this luxurious cover of new turf and framed by magnificent trees.”

Vincent Diaz, a registered nurse at the Mount Sinai Medical Center nearby, took a lunch break on a bench next to the meadow, which was still fenced off. “It beats the patch of dirt that had been there,” Mr. Diaz said. “The wind would blow it in your face. It wasn’t too pleasant. This is beautiful.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2011, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Restoring A Meadow To Grandeur. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe